A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

The identification of mediumship with women and the masculine “nature” of public
speech cast the medium as a sort of hybrid figure in terms of gender, recalling the ambiguity so
central to myth. “Men could become mediums, but only if they showed the feminine
characteristics that would disqualify them for more traditional forms of leadership.” 101 The
attentive reader will recall that, in his treatise on Modern Nirvanaism, William Danmar went so
far as to claim that “the few materializing mediums who were men were close to being true
hermaphrodites.” Humorist Mortimer Thompson referred to mediums as “crack-brained
masculine women or addle-headed feminine men.” 102 Women were allowed, or allowed
themselves, to exhibit a variety of masculine behaviors when controlled by spirits. One Mrs.
Cecil M. Cook, a noted medium of her day, provided some examples of the benefits of spirit
control in her autobiography, How I Discovered my Mediumship. In describing her cloyingly
named spirit control, “Feetheart” (a little “Indian maiden” with an apparent lisp), Mrs. Cook said
of her spirit friend, “She will control me on the street, in a restaurant or in a store, and she says
what she thinks. Her thoughts are most pronounced on subjects.” 103
Mrs. Cook describes her
earliest phase as a medium at the age of six, during which she would cause spirit voices to
emerge through a hole of the stove-pipe in her family home. At the time she suffered from the
fear and derision of her neighbors who assumed that she was mad, in league with the devil, or
both.
No matter what these busybodies said about me and my gift, they recognized that the
Voices, coming so audibly through the stovepipe-hole, told the truth. They told it a trifle
unmercifully at times, when defending me. But — for all that, it was the truth, and very
early in my earth-life, I found that so few people care to hear the truth. 104
101 Braude, 58.
102 Kerr, 35.
103 Mrs. Cecil M. Cook, “How I Discovered my Mediumship” in Spiritualism I: Spiritualist Thought, ed. Gary L.
Ward (New York: Garland Press, 1990) 53.
104 Cook, 29.
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